Late Tuesday, President Joe Biden added Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties to the list of three California counties for which he has issued a Major Disaster Declaration. This declaration, which also adds Monterey County, is of critical help not just for local governments and tribal authorities in making their disaster reimbursement claims with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but for individual homeowners and business owners as well. For communities that have been bombarded by last week’s lashing rains, floods, mudslides, and debris flows, this declaration qualifies as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Congressmembers Salud Carbajal — who represents all of Santa Barbara and S.L.O counties — and Jimmy Panetta of Monterey County have been working behind the scenes and in public lobbying President Biden and FEMA Regional Director Robert Fenton to get this declaration issued. Biden’s decision to make the Major Disaster Declaration for Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Monterey counties now brings the total number of state counties to six. Earlier this week, Biden had issued such a declaration for Sacramento, Merced, and Santa Cruz counties. Biden, not coincidentally, will be arriving somewhere in the Central Coast sometime this Thursday.
Carbajal spent early Tuesday morning bending the ear of FEMA Regional Director Fenton before embarking on an assessment tour of northern Santa Barbara County and southern San Luis Obispo County. In Santa Barbara, he wrote to Biden, 500,000 cubic yards of debris needs to be excavated from the county’s six debris basins. In Los Osos in S.L.O. County, one person has been confirmed dead and a 5-year-old boy was swept away by the raging waters; 12 homes there have been all but destroyed, “flooded by mud,” Carbajal said. The road into Avila Beach, home to the Avila Beach nuclear power reactors, has been rendered impassable.